I just purchased a 350mhz dell. I bought if from a computer warehouse. The hard drive does not have an O.S. on it so I took a hard drive from my other pc and connected it. Bios recognized the drive, however upon booting, that one screen shows with the option to boot in safe mode, command prompt. or start normally. no matter which option I choose, the computer reboots and the same screen comes back. A blue screen appears for less than a half second before restart. I took a picture so i could read it. it reads that the hard drive may have a virus or the cables might not be connected. I have replaced the ribbon cables, switched the hard drive with another operational hard drive and still get the same screen. I also tried to boot from the cd rom first and inserted a windows 98 cd, told bios to boot from cd, but still the screen appears. I have yet to try a boot from a boot disk, but i figured if my operational hard drive wasnt working that it must be something else. So throw me some ideas scobod

I don't mean criticize you, but it is never a good idea to install a hard drive, that has been in another computer with an OS on it, into another computer with different model of motherboard, modems, etc. The drivers that are installed on the hard drive that you installed are incompatible with the machine you installed the drive in, because you're using a different models of internal componets than the models the drivers were made for. Go to bootdisk.com on another computer, and get a Windows 98 Bootdisk. Open the file, and stick in a blank floppy. Then, take the disk and put it in the problem computer, and boot up with it. Select to boot with CDROM Support. At the A:\ prompt, type "format C:" (without quotes) and press enter. After that's completed, stick in your Windows 98 CD, and type SETUP and press enter.

The bootdisk I mentioned is here: http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~huey/Downloads/boot98se.exe I should correct myself saying that when you type SETUP to install Windows 98, do it like this instead: E:\SETUP and press enter.